The newest front in the “war on women,” apparently: Calling a female pol out on her self-serving B.S.

Despite claiming she never used her Native American heritage when applying for a job, Elizabeth Warren’s campaign admitted last night the Democrat listed her minority status in professional directories for years when she taught at the University of Texas and the University of Pennsylvania…

The Herald reported Friday that embattled Harvard Law School officials touted Warren’s Native American heritage — she reportedly has ancestors from the Cherokee and Delaware tribes — as proof of the faculty’s diversity…

Mindy Myers, Warren’s campaign manager, had this to say today:

“If Scott Brown has questions about Elizabeth Warren’s well-known qualifications — from her high marks as a teacher to her nationally recognized work on bankruptcy and the pressures on middle class families – he ought to ask them directly instead of hiding behind the nasty insinuations of his campaign and trying to score political points. Once again, the qualifications and ability of a woman are being called into question by Scott Brown who did the same thing with the Supreme Court nomination of Elena Kagan. It’s outrageous.”

It’s not so much a story about Warren’s heritage, in other words, as whether she lied about it in order to boost her appeal to Harvard as a solution to their diversity problem. According to her campaign, Charles Fried helped recruit her to the school and swears that her ancestry played no part, by which I assume he means that Warren didn’t bring it up in interviews, etc. Fair enough, but as the Herald notes, she was listed as a minority professor in the Association of American Law Schools’ annual directory from 1986 to 1995. She joined Harvard Law as a visiting professor in 1992 and became a full-time prof there in 1995, which means she was still being listed as a minority for a few years while she was there. Did whoever hired her know about that? Via Ace, David Bernstein at the Volokh Conspiracy finds another curiosity:

The old AALS Directory of Faculty guides are online (through academic libraries) at Hein Online. The directories starting listing minority faculty in an appendix in 1986. There’s Elizabeth Warren, listed as a professor at Texas. I spot-checked three additional directories from when she was a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, including 1995-96, the year Harvard offered her a position. Elizabeth Warren, Elizabeth Warren, Elizabeth Warren.

So, we know one thing with almost 100% certainty: Elizabeth Warren identified herself as a minority law professor. We know something else with 90%+ certainty: (at least some) folks at Harvard were almost certainly aware that she identified as a minority law professor, though they may not have known which ethnic group she claimed to be belong to, and it may not have played any role in her hiring.

But it gets even more interesting: once Warren joined the Harvard faculty, she dropped off the list of minority law faculty. Now that’s passing strange. When the AALS directory form came around before Warren arrived at Harvard, she was proud enough of her Native American ancestry to ask that she be listed among the minority law professors. (Or, in the unlikely even that she just allowed law school administrators to fill out the forms for her without reviewing them, they were aware that she claimed such ancestry, and she didn’t object when she was listed.) Once she arrived at Harvard, however, she no longer chose to be listed as a minority law professor.

Verrrrrry curious. I’m not hung up on the fact that she apparently can’t produce any documents attesting to her ancestry; that’s not unusual when it comes to genealogy, although it does raise the question of what proof is sufficient to justify claiming minority status. (Follow the link to Bernstein’s post and read down for more on that.) The fact that her name disappeared from the minority listings in the AALS directory is interesting, though. Three possibilities. One: She was lying all along and dropped the charade once her mission of getting a job at Harvard had been accomplished. Two: She sincerely thought she had Native American ancestry but then learned something in 1995 that convinced her otherwise, so she quietly dropped minority status. In that case, though, why is she claiming it now when the press is grilling her on it? Three: Maybe the standards of proof for claiming minority status changed at Harvard or AALS such that Warren felt obliged to drop her official claim. She still thinks of herself as Native American, in other words, but she can’t prove it to the relevant authority’s comfort. That should be easy enough to check, though. Bottom line: If she’s serious about her heritage, why stop acknowledging it in the mid-90s? There’s no obvious explanation.

While you mull that, here’s Scott Brown enjoying one of the greatest moments of retail politics in recent American history.

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Elizabeth Warren camp: It’s kind of sexist for Scott Brown to ask if she’s lying about being Native American

I bet Richard Blumenthal is thinking, “Not fair. I shouldn’t have been able to use the gender card when everyone found I that I lied about serving in Vietnam. We need an Equal Rights Amendment for Men.”

Uraguay yeah maybe you would be eligible for a semi automatic LOL! I think you got to be coming from directly below the southern border -somewhere around Laredo Nuevo area, to you know, get your hands on the real fire power.

Dr Evil on April 30, 2012 at 9:36 PM

Hey, my parents were vacationing in Mexico 9 months before I was born (wink, wink), so I claim to have been “Made in Mexico.” Got something for me?

I don’t believe it is sexist at all and I think he has every reason to ask. Because of the way you are acting, he probably thought you must be at least part indian and you indian name is little running dumb sheet.

My wife is 1/4 Ho-Chunk Indian(used to be called Winnebago). She is documented as such and even gets a per capita payment every 3 months from the tribe(casino’s, you know).
One of the things she liked about me when we first met, is that I didn’t say I was part Native American, because I am not.
I understood why people who said they were Native irritated her a little after we started dating, because when some people(white) would find out she is Native, they would say they are too. And invariably they would say they are “Cherokee”(I guess they can’t think of any other tribe to mention).
She told me that the “real” Native Americans think of those people as jokes. They can never verify their ethnicity nor provide documentation. And they are ALWAYS Cherokee.
We went to a pow-wow down in Indiana which was nothing like the ones we usually attend, because down there the MAJORITY of “Indians” were white. And the ones we happened to talk to ALWAYS said they were Cherokee. I couldn’t believe it! Now I can’t say that absolutely none of them had any trace of Native blood in them, but come on! When you are whiter than my underpants(…ok, maybe my underpants are a bad example) why even try to say that you are a Native. Maybe a native of New Jersey!
Why do some white Americans find it so hard to be proud of THEIR OWN heritage(like me, I am of German/Norwegian ancestry) instead of being consumed by either some “white guilt” or some hippie movement that wants to “feel” closer to nature(which is what I think some of those white Cherokees are). Better yet, just be proud to be American.

In last night’s show, Professor Gates determined that Condi Rice is actually almost half Euorpean, so I’m sure he could track down Elizabeth Warren’s Cherokee & Delaware tribal ancestors.

wren on April 30, 2012 at 8:39 PM

That’s really a pretty good idea, wren. When “the incident” that led to the beer summit first hit the news, it was reported that Mr. Gates was returning from a trip to China where he was researching the ancestry of cellist Yo Yo Ma. I’ve been trying to get My My Ma to hire him ever since, because we’ve been unable to track our lineage through Ancestry.com.

“Of 71 current Law School professors and assistant professors, 11 are women, five are black, one is Native American and one is Hispanic,” The Harvard Crimson quotes then-Law School spokesman Mike Chmura as saying in a 1996 article. The Crimson added that 83 percent of the Law School’s students believed the number of minority women on staff was inadequate. …

And the latest battle in the War on Dictionaries: Minion Mindy Myers defining “sexist” to mean “suggesting that a US Senate candidate should have better ethical standards than Ward Churchill.”
M.Scott Eiland on April 30, 2012 at 11:34 PM

“That a university is zealous in policing the academic standards of its faculty does not demonstrate bias against a noncompliant faculty member so much as it demonstrates a bias in favor of compliance with the rules of academia,” the opinion stated.

In re Ms. Warren’s claims,

Three: Maybe the standards of proof for claiming minority status changed at Harvard or AALS such that Warren felt obliged to drop her official claim. She still thinks of herself as Native American, in other words, but she can’t prove it to the relevant authority’s comfort. That should be easy enough to check, though.

There are definite standards at the BIA for asserting the rights and privileges of being a Native American, although informally anyone with an ancestral link can claim the heritage.

Who is an American Indian or Alaska Native?
As a general rule, an American Indian or Alaska Native person is someone who has blood degree from and is recognized as such by a federally recognized tribe or village (as an enrolled tribal member) and/or the United States. Of course, blood quantum (the degree of American Indian or Alaska Native blood from a federally recognized tribe or village that a person possesses) is not the only means by which a person is considered to be an American Indian or Alaska Native. Other factors, such as a person’s knowledge of his or her tribe’s culture, history, language, religion, familial kinships, and how strongly a person identifies himself or herself as American Indian or Alaska Native, are also important. In fact, there is no single federal or tribal criterion or standard that establishes a person’s identity as American Indian or Alaska Native.

There are major differences, however, when the term “American Indian” is used in an ethnological sense versus its use in a political/legal sense. The rights, protections, and services provided by the United States to individual American Indians and Alaska Natives flow not from a person’s identity as such in an ethnological sense, but because he or she is a member of a federally recognized tribe. That is, a tribe that has a government-to-government relationship and a special trust relationship with the United States. These special trust and government-to-government relationships entail certain legally enforceable obligations and responsibilities on the part of the United States to persons who are enrolled members of such tribes. Eligibility requirements for federal services will differ from program to program. Likewise, the eligibility criteria for enrollment (or membership) in a tribe will differ from tribe to tribe.

My father’s father’s mother claimed to be part-Cherokee (and her pictures looked it), but when she and Great-grandpa tried to take part in the Oklahoma land grants program, she wasn’t able to “prove up on it” because of lack of documentation.
So they stayed in Texas.

truthczar wrote:
I’m not accusing her of milking her “undocumented” Native American Heritage, but the word on the street is she will be filing a zoning variance with Cambridge to convert her mansion to a casino.

Lets see to get to 10,000 by powers of 2… hmmmm… 14 powers, which would be 14 generations constantly out-marrying to not get any more native lineage… now put in a traditional 40 year generation… 560 years and even if you knocked that in half, say, for some minimum time for physical maturity and starting another generation you come up with 280 years….

So Warren was born in 1949, subtract 280… gets you to 1669. Now do the more robust traditional generation used for marking this things, as it goes along with her majority ancestry, and is an important marker for seeing when the first European shacked up with the first Native and you get… 1389. And that would be for a tribe that lived in Georgia, Carolinas and part of Tennessee. And considering the Spanish didn’t find the tribe until the 16th century, in which case she would also have to be touting her Hispanic 1/10,000 background, you have to push the early more northernly European contact around 1654.

And her family gets to PA in 1770? And intermarries with one of the first Virginia Colonial families that had not been intermarrying with anyone of Cherokee descent since that very first contact? And do remember that would have to be a few generations of sub-20 year-olds marrying quickly to get there.

Nope, can’t buy 1/10,000. I would have a hard time at 1/1,000, a mere 10 generations which would be a really hard thing to do.

It really is amazing how liberal fools like Liz the Dizz — living in a special “reality” where down is up and up is down, and her head spins ’round and ’round — can get through each day without falling off a cliff or stepping in front of a bus. Someone ought to follow her around and see how she does it.

Warren campaign says it’s digging up evidence of Native American heritage to satisfy the press.

If she has been making this claim for some years now, why does anybody need to “dig” up the information ?
I’d think it would be documented now.
Also, interesting that she wants to satisfy the press and not the voters.
Looks as if she just got caught with her hand in the cookie jar.

I am SOOOOOO sick of pathetic, petty, politicians playing political and political correctness games in an attempt to manipulate the public’s emotions. Questioning someone’s ethnicity is not ‘SEXIST’, anyway. Questioning whether Elizabeth Warren is indeed a woman or a male would be ‘sexist’, not ”racist’. In making this calim of ‘racism’, Warren not only demonstrates her quick preferance for polical gamesmanship but her ignorance in not knowing the difference between ‘racism’ and ‘sexism’. If she is too stupid to know the difference yet all too eager to call someone one or the other she has no business being in office.

I hope I get this right. I am a little fuzzy as we only talked about this once. My son’s girlfriend is a card carrying member of a tribe but if she would marry my son and have children, the children might not be members of the tribe because she is already only 1/8th Native American. Her tribe would accept the children if she decided to live on a reservation but they would not automatically qualify for Native American benefits or membership in the tribe.

This reminds me of when the author Louise Erdrich declined to take the DNA test to determine her Native American percentage and she has documented family members in a tribe. Henry Gates, himself, (yes, that Gates) found out he was more European than African. Meh.

Why do some white Americans find it so hard to be proud of THEIR OWN heritage(like me, I am of German/Norwegian ancestry) instead of being consumed by either some “white guilt” or some hippie movement that wants to “feel” closer to nature(which is what I think some of those white Cherokees are). Better yet, just be proud to be American.

Sterling Holobyte on May 1, 2012 at 12:26 AM

You may have a point. But I think a lot of ‘whites’ go this route bcs it seems exotic, special somehow.
I taught screwl with a very white woman who was documented 1/8 Lakota & she got to go to college for free. There are lots of people around here in SD-ND area bearing Lakota genetics.
Perhaps some folks do it for the bennies?

This reminds me of when the author Louise Erdrich declined to take the DNA test to determine her Native American percentage and she has documented family members in a tribe. Henry Gates, himself, (yes, that Gates) found out he was more European than African. Meh.

Oh, yeah, Elizabeth Warren is a liar. Surprise.

Fallon on May 1, 2012 at 7:51 AM

Didn’t know that. Is that the same Gates with that genealogy show that ALWAYS ends up with the guess having some ancestors who owned slaves?
Bcs while I am obsessed with genealogy, that show grows tiresome with the guilt slave meme I have purposely quit watching it.
News flash: If you have Colonial ancestors, there’s a damned good chance you’re related to previous slave owners.

I remember, back in elementry school, at the start of every semester, the teacher would ask two questions: 1) are any of you indian? 2) Do any of your parents work at the bomber plant? These questions were asked because these groups or their employer did not pay property taxes, and the government supplemented our schools with an in-kind payment. When the kids in my class raised their hands on the first question, I was the only one that didn’t. There was no way a blond German kid could get away with it. I would have given anything to be an indian then. Not now.

Actually, we have 46 chromosomes and lose half of them each generation. I think (with the exception of the male chromosome and the female mitrocondria DNA, after seven generations, there is no trace of you. I am not a biblical nut, but considering the ancient Hebrew knowledge of selective breeding, they might have known something of the “sins of the father.”

It isn’t that hard to prove Indian heritage, at least it wasn’t for me. If you know you have an Indian ancestor, their name (I assume she does since she’s made the claim) and you know the tribe, the Dawes roll registered huge number of Indians in the US.

I got my Grandfather’s BIA number from my Stepmother and it was very easy to do the subsequent research. All I had to do was write to the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma, provide his name, BIA number, and for twenty dollars I had a complete Paternal family history consisting of five generations dating back to before the Civil War.

Warren seems to be another Native American poser/wannabe. In her political position it should be easy to do the actual research if she’s REALLY a Native American. She’s another Ward Churchill.

Warren not only demonstrates her quick preferance for polical gamesmanship but her ignorance in not knowing the difference between ‘racism’ and ‘sexism’. If she is too stupid to know the difference yet all too eager to call someone one or the other she has no business being in office.

easyt65 on May 1, 2012 at 7:39 AM

She isn’t stupid she knows to stick to the progressive talking points “republican war on women”. See Scott Brown wouldn’t have questioned her lame claim to minority status if she had been a man see….

Are Massachusetts voters so dim they can’t recognize a crank running for high office? This is the woman who claimed to be the inspiration for the OWS movement, until the OWS movement became unpopular. Warren’s claim to minority status through an undocumented Indian ancestor is as big a whopper as Hillary Clinton claiming she came under gun fire on the tarmac in Tuzla.

This woman will say anything to work the system, and apparently Massachusetts voters.

I used to work for a large corp. and back in the 80’s all the companies were scrambling to find current employees who had any diversity of ethnicity or even a Hispanic sounding last name. They had to prove to the feds that they were meeting some kind of quota that had been set up under the new affirmative action program. It had to be met for hiring and promotions. Forget about firing an AA. If she didn’t use being 1/32nd NA then the U who hired her certainly did.

If Warren does have an ancestor on the 1894 Dawes Act tribal rolls of the Cherokee, as is suggested at Volokh Conspiracy, then she might qualify for membership in the Cherokee Nation. That is a decision for the Tribe to make, and there seems to be little evidence that Warren was interested enough to follow up on that. Which makes her behavior seem much more like that of Ward Churchill, a white man who self-identified to the University of Colorado as an American Indian, because the university wanted to hire some American Indians for diversity purposes. As people investigated Churchill’s academic qualities and qualifications, it became apparent that (1) he wasn’t academically qualified to be on the faculty because he had an MA and no Ph.D, and (2) he wasn’t recognized as an Indian by any federally recognized tribe.

It would be ironic if Warren was as proven to be as cynical as Churchill, but shown to have more legitimate Indian ancestry. Even so, her behavior is much more in line with Ward Churchill than Vine Deloria. Claiming that it is ‘sexist’ to ask the question about her self-identification as an Indian is just another way of behaving like an academic or politician and weasel out of answering a pointed question she doesn’t like. Oh, yeah, I guess that’s no surprise – she IS an academic and a politician.

Uraguay yeah maybe you would be eligible for a semi automatic LOL! I think you got to be coming from directly below the southern border -somewhere around Laredo Nuevo area, to you know, get your hands on the real fire power.

Dr Evil on April 30, 2012 at 9:36 PM

Hey, my parents were vacationing in Mexico 9 months before I was born (wink, wink), so I claim to have been “Made in Mexico.” Got something for me?

CJ on April 30, 2012 at 10:48 PM

Depends CJ, was it before or after NAFTA passed :) If it was Cancun or Acapulco, the ATF should at least comp your folks GRIN.

To be acknowledged for Indian status for minority designation via the EEOC (and as woman adding her minority status makes her what we called a double dipper) you were required to have acknowledgement from the tribe.

To be a woman and a minority would be an advantage to Warren – especially in academia – in every job search she was a part of. So she is a liar, and a cheat because even being 1/8 doesn’t give you minority status unless you are documented.

Michael Graham is now referring to Warren as “Faux-cahontas” on Boston radio.

This reminds me so much of 2010, when the smug liberal Martha Coakley ran against Scott Brown. She was widely expected to win, but was so politically inept that she handed the election to Brown when she lost the blue-collar vote.

Now we have Faux-cahontas, who also “laid the intellectual foundations for Occupy Wall Street” (gee, that must have taken a few minutes), tripping all over herself and ready to hand Brown another victory.

Brown’s a good guy, sincere, charming, and just the kind of moderate Republican who can squeak-out a win in Massachusetts, but he has also been very lucky in his opponents. If the GOP holds this seat, it will be largely because of the cluelessness of the Massachusetts Democratic Party in choosing Warren (with help from Obama, who also pushed Warren to run).

(For those not from MA, spare me the RINO crap about Brown. He is as far to the right as you can be and still win in this state. When the state changes, you can back someone more conservative. Right now, it’s him or Warren, and Warren is about as far left as Barbara Boxer. At age 62, if she wins in 2012, expect her to be re-elected through 2030.)

It seems like darn near everyone is out there trying to find some way to claim minority status. Why not? The gubmint puts so much much weight in giving contracts to minorities its almost impossible for a middle-aged white guy to have a successful company as a government contractor.
However, I just can’t push myself that far. I’ve got family tree showing an ancestor from the 1700s from either Nipmuc or Narragansett tribe in Massachusetts (we don’t know which). Although I often say I’ve got Scottish, Welsh, French-Canadian, English, and American Indian ancestry (covering all the parts I know of), I don’t claim any minority status – I’m just an American melting pot mutt – and proud of it. BUUUTTT – if could open my own casino…..

The question whether one can prove tribal identification is a bit muddled. If it is a matter of belonging to a specific tribe, then one has to qualify for membership in that tribe. Otherwise, no documentation is possible. To qualify for membership you have to establish a certain blood quantum (I think for Cherokee it is 1/4) or that someone within a certain degree of consanguinity is a registered member.

I worked for a long time in dependency court handling ICWA (Indian Child Welfare Act) cases and these questions arose all the time. No documentation, but someone’s great-aunt Minnie knew everything but she died last year. But lots of lower-income black and white people from the south and southwest had family lore about Indian heritage, especially with Blackfeet and Cherokee (stemming from the forced migrations in the 1800s). Those situations were not documented almost by definition.

So the mere fact that Warren is not going to be able to document any tribal heritage does not mean it is not there, just that it is not and will not be documented. So be it. The real issue is not that, but her unscrupulous use of that “status” to further her own career.

I look forward to the day when most people are checking multiple boxes on the ethnicity forms…so we can dispense with them.

krome on May 1, 2012 at 11:18 AM

I already do(check multiple boxes) just to screw with their racist compartmentalizing games. It’s funny when they try and print my driver’s license and they have to ask the uncomfortable question of ‘which do I prefer?’. I tell them I don’t prefer any of them over another. They almost always settle for “other”.

I’m 1/8th Oneida Nation (documented) and yet I’ve never claimed minority status for any benefits…. you should see the job offers I get though. I go to interviews just to see them squirm when I walk in and my very obvious German and Scottish tan(or lack thereof) is what they see instead of a “Redskin” :) Ahhh I love screwing with bureaucrats.

Back in my home state of Colorado, I well recall the first influx of back-to-nature-eastern-liberals (every one of whom wouldn’t have lasted 48 hours in the wilderness). It never ceased to amaze me how many of them claimed to be “part Native American.” Oh, and their dogs were invariably “part wolf” too.